Posts published by David Brooks and Gail Collins

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, I have to ask you what you think about Chris Christie and the George Washington Bridge.

David Brooks: What do you mean? Is there some scandal involving Chris Christie and a bridge? I hadn’t heard. Next thing you’ll tell me A-Rod isn’t perfect.

Gail: I knew you’d be thrilled by this topic.

David: Actually, I’m struck first by the insane levels of pettiness revealed in the whole trove of emails. Not that this is unusual. I once had a candidate tell me he wanted to win election just so he could deny jobs to people he didn’t like.

Gail: Wow, talk about truth-tellers.

David: But I’m still not convinced this will be a big problem for Christie. If people are of a mind to vote for him, it will be because they want a tough, somewhat bullying guy to go to Washington to take the place on. A scandal that suggests he is a tough, bullying guy makes him look unpleasant, but not unelectable.

Gail: I feel guilty bringing up tawdry politics when you’ve been trying to improve the conversation with more talk about culture and morality. Is there any way to elevate the question of whether Christie’s staff tried to punish mayors who wouldn’t endorse him by clogging local traffic or – as we’re hearing now – canceling a meeting with the state treasurer?

David: Wait, are we supposed to think that canceling a meeting with the state treasurer is a scandal? Sounds like the basis for a healthier life. As for the other stuff, no, there’s no way to elevate that. All politics is schoolyard.

Gail: I’m not going to be able to get past tawdry schoolyard politics today. I apologize in advance. Although I am recalling that last week you led us into a debate about dogs versus cats. That gives me courage to press on.

David: I’m glad my efforts to bury my head in the sand have been encouraging to you. Denial and irrelevance really are my bread and butter these days.

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Left, an artist's drawing of the high-speed trains projected to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco; right, the George Washington BridgeCredit California High Speed Rail Authority, via European Pressphoto Agency; Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Gail: Christie’s dilemma has a lot of interesting layers. Like the bully issue. There seems to be almost universal agreement that Americans don’t want a bully in the White House. Do you think that’s true? A bully who could spread fear and terror throughout Washington and actually get things done might be an interesting change. However, if all we’re going to get out of it is a four-day traffic jam, I’ll pass.

David: As my friend Mike Murphy put it, Christie does not come in small doses. I’ve always thought his presidential prospects were going to depend on America’s exhaustion point. What I mean is this: A guy like Christie comes over for dinner. He’s big. He’s brash. He’s kind of funny. You like the way he’s willing to take on the other obnoxious guests. For the first 90 minutes of the meal, you’re thrilled with the guy. But then, round about minute 100, you’re getting a little, well, fatigued. You just want to sit back and relax. You wish he wasn’t on so much, you wish he wasn’t perpetually in your face. When he leaves, you’re glad to be slipping back into your own boring life.

That’s how voters may feel about Christie: They’re glad when he’s up on stage. They’re glad when he goes away. They may figure four years of this would just be too exhausting.

A lot of it depends on how disgusted the country is with Washington. If they are disgusted enough, then they may figure he’s exactly what we need. In an era of no trust, the rules are different.

Gail: I’ve only seen Christie offstage in private settings a couple of times, but he always seemed very pleasant. You don’t often find a politician who’s unbearable in public and charming behind closed doors. The opposite is generally the norm.

Anyhow, here’s another Christie-related question. What does this scandal say about the political divide on transportation? Do you agree that Democrats tend toward mass transit while Republicans embrace the code of the car? I admit it’s far from universal, but there seems to be a distinct G.O.P. antipathy toward buses and trains.

David: When I was at The Weekly Standard I had a friend who had notable antipathy to light rail. I think he was very friendly to heavy rail, though. Overall, it’s certainly true that dense, Democratic areas have a lot more public transport than sparse, Republican areas, but I haven’t noticed it as a big subject of conversation.

Gail: My biggest beef with Christie – until the latest excitement – was that he killed the Hudson River rail tunnel. This was a long-awaited federally funded project to provide more, swifter train access from New Jersey to Manhattan. It would probably also have reduced traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Not that anybody cares about that.

Christie claimed there could be overruns that would cost New Jersey more money. He also kept calling it “a tunnel to the basement of Macy’s,” which gave his opposition a populist, anti-Manhattan tone. Which sounded nice, I guess. Unless, of course, you were a New Jerseyite trying to get to work at Macy’s.

David: I confess I was for the Hudson River tunnel, but I recall that the fiscal case he argued made sense. But now he’s offended my sense of demographic propriety. Since when is Macy’s the epitome of upscale Manhattan chichi? That store is as middle-class as they come. I could understand if he’d said it was a tunnel to the basement of Henri Bendel. Bullying I can defend. Bad pop sociology is beyond the pale.

Gail: On Thursday Christie is scheduled to appear at a fund-raiser for a guy named Steve Lonegan, a New Jersey Republican who’s running for Congress. Lonegan opposed federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Sandy, saying New Jersey should just “suck it up.” Somehow, I feel we will be able to connect that to the new inquiry into the federal aid Christie used to make expensive TV ads featuring Chris Christie.

David: I have to say Lonegan sounds like my kind of guy. After all, it was exactly that “suck it up” spirit that built New Jersey.

Gail: Lonegan recently lost a special race for the U.S. Senate. It was held on Oct. 16 so it wouldn’t distract attention from the grand and glorious election for governor three weeks later. It was also the contest during which Lonegan said: “I don’t care about working together and all that nonsense.”

David: Yes, I remember that grand and glorious race. I’m in favor of candor, but some people should just realize that candor is not their friend.

Gail: My final report on Chris Christie’s schedule is that this weekend he’s supposed to be in Florida to campaign for Gov. Rick Scott, who rejected more than $2 billion in federal money to build a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando. Given the amount of time reporters spend trekking around the middle of Florida in presidential primary years, I was really rooting for that one.

David: I knew we’d get back to rail! I think it’s a good rule that states with palm trees should not be building elaborate rail networks. The one in California is a giant disaster. I find it hard to believe that such a project would be profitable in Florida, a state with a bunch of long, straight highways over ample open swampland, and sprawling cities like Orlando, Fort Myers and Tampa.

Gail: Governor Scott, by the way, ranks somewhere around sinkholes in the esteem of Florida voters. Maybe we can call this whole year Revenge of the Trains.

David: That’s because Scott is trying to instill that “suck it up” spirit that also made Florida great — he’s trying to restore the rugged individualism that made the early settlers decide to go to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Florida is a state for convertibles, not cabooses.

Gail: If Florida is the Convertible State, what would that make New Jersey? Chris Christie, hurricane rebuilding, traffic-jamming your opponents. Welcome to the Bulldozer State.

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

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Socks Clinton at the podium in the White House briefing room in March 1994.Credit Marcy Nighswander/Associated Press

David Brooks: As is well known, the world is divided into two sorts of people: those who divide the world into two sorts of people and those who don’t.

Gail Collins: I demand equal rights for those of us who divide the world into three kinds of people. At this moment I am working on just such a — um — trialism.

David: Not to get theological on you, but I believe the word you’re searching for is Trinitarian. Putting that large subject aside, I am a chronic dualist. I believe in Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between hedgehogs and foxes. I believe in David Riesman’s distinction between inner directed and other directed. I believe in Matthew Arnold’s distinction between Hebraic and Hellenistic. I believe in Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I think all dualisms are true. How about you?

Gail: Well, there’s Republican and Democrat. However, dueling parties is sort of an American thing. I have been watching that Danish political series, “Borgen,” lately and the Danes have a ton of parties. You can be Liberal or Radical Liberal or Danish People’s or Conservative People’s. Or, according to the series, you can belong to a weenie group that appears to consist only of one cranky young woman who used to be a squatter.

That seems more common than our dual system. What do you call it when you divide the world into a dozen pieces?

David: A full out nuclear exchange.

One of the nice things about being right-leaning is that I never watch Danish political dramas. Come to think of it, if you had to identify yourself on the basis of the above dualisms, how would you do it? I’d say I’m a fox who wishes he were a hedgehog. In other words I wish there were one all explaining theory of the universe that I could really sign up for, but I just haven’t found it.

Gail: I like the stories about the lion and the – something else. Lamb, mouse, amoeba – there are a lot of stories about the lion and a little weakling animal that turns out to be pretty canny. Then the moral is always that everybody can get along. Except in the case of the lion and the cobra, which I believe is an old Sinead O’Connor album.

David: Unless the lion were Aslan, I’d go with the wisdom of the serpent and the virtue of the dove. But back to dualisms: I used to be other-directed until I started reading the comments section under the columns; now I’m more inner-directed. I’m Hellenistic, but I should probably be more Hebraic. And I’m an Apollonian who probably should have been more Dionysian when I was young.

Gail: Wow, David, if we keep this up I’ll be forced to tell you about my lost youth as a Goldwater girl.

David: But I didn’t come here for a full set of confessions. I came here to bounce another dualism off of you. Do you think politicians are divided between cat politicians and dog politicians?

Gail: I have no idea, but I do know that readers love it when we talk pets. I’m already living in hope that during the next presidential cycle, we’ll discover that one of the candidates tossed a cat out of his dorm window, and I will get to mention it endlessly.

David: What if it’s a Democrat? Do you promise?

I don’t mean that some politicians own cats and others own dogs. That distinction is well known. In politics, owning a dog is practically obligatory for presidents while owning a cat is discriminated against. If a president even owns a cat (Lincoln, van Buren, McKinley, Carter and Clinton did) they usually keep the cat in the background. Presidential dogs are much more famous. I’m not sure you could get elected these days as a person who owned a cat but no dog.

Gail: This discussion makes me wish Rudy Giuliani had done better with his presidential aspirations. Then we could talk about his grand crusade against ferret owners.

But you were worrying about the lack of famous presidential cats. What about Socks Clinton? Although I am forced to avoid pronouns when discussing Socks because I have no idea whether Socks was a boy or a girl. Which I guess makes your point.

David: Come to think of it, this is a grave injustice. Why should we be discriminating against cat owners in this way? Why are there not marches and Supreme Court cases? I’m suddenly filled with righteous indignation. To the barricades!

Gail: David, once long ago I was on book tour and wound up at a reading with several other authors, all of whom wrote cat mysteries. That was the only time I’ve run into this much feline enthusiasm. But I know you speak for many Americans.

David: And I say this even though research suggests that Republicans are more likely to be dog people while Democrats are cat people. Nine of the 10 states with the highest rates of dog ownership voted for Romney. And this is despite a certain dog on the roof episode you may have heard about. Meanwhile, four of the top five states with the highest cat ownership went for Obama (Vermont, Maine, Oregon, Washington).

Gail: I’m thinking we’re just talking about empty states versus crowded states. That’s my longstanding theory about what underlies most of our politics. If you’re in a crowded state you appreciate the role of government, and if you’re in an empty state you tend not to see the point.

If you’re in an empty place, you would definitely want a dog for hunting and guarding purposes. But if you’re in, say, a studio apartment in a 20-floor condo building, you might be thinking cat.

David: I have no data on this. In New York, you see tons of dogs, but I guess that’s because hardly anyone takes the cat out for a walk. More discrimination!

Actually, my distinction is this. Some politicians have dog personalities and some have cat personalities. For example, Bill Clinton has a dog personality: eager to befriend, occasionally socially overenthusiastic. Barack Obama has a cat personality. He is a more self-sufficient, a little aloof, not pack oriented. Of presidents over the last hundred years, I would add both Bushes, L.B.J., J.F.K. and F.D.R. to the dog category.

Gail: I do remember L.B.J. picking up that beagle by the ears. Some of the presidents you named seemed to suffer from a short attention span, which I would definitely say is a dog thing.

David: I put Carter, Nixon, Coolidge and Wilson in the cat category. Eisenhower was a cat personality who put on the appearance of being a dog personality.

Gail: Eisenhower seems more like tanks versus golf clubs.

David: I say all this having read Nicholas Wade’s review, “What Your Cat Is Thinking,” in the paper earlier this week. He notes that while dogs have been domesticated for eons, cats are still essentially wild. According to Dr. John Bradshaw, the author of “Cat Sense,” cats regard humans as larger nonhostile cats. Dogs have adapted to life with humans and respond to human cues as if humans are humans. Cats have less highly evolved social behaviors.

Gail: I have finally figured out how to divide this in three! Guinea pigs. Right now I have a dog, but in the past I’ve had some really good experiences with pet guinea pigs. They do tend to squeal a lot and are totally fixated on short-term rewards. So guinea pigs can be Congress. Or maybe just the Senate, while the House is more hamster-y. Same behavior pattern, just harder to hear the individual squeaks.

Of the looming presidential candidates, Biden is definitely a big dog personality. Governor Christie is, too, but he’s got a louder bark. Personally, I could be persuaded that America needs a big, friendly dog in the White House, someone who is open toward everyone, no matter how rude people are. I’d like to see a politician who could win the country over with love and licking, and an endless capacity to fetch.

Gail: You’ve completely ignored Hillary, who I remember talking with great enthusiasm about her dog. His name was – or I guess still is – Seamus, the same as the Romneys’ Irish setter who got carted to Canada on the roof of the car.

I had intended never to bring Seamus up again, but now I’m thinking maybe the pet theme should be less about dualism and more about the perfect circle of political life.

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Patrick T. Fallon for The New York TimesCaucus tellers counted the votes in the Republican Presidential Caucus at Clive Precinct 4 on Jan. 3 in Clive, Iowa.

David Brooks: Gail, anybody can be a pundit when there’s some decisive thing to talk about, but when you’ve got a tie, that’s when we separate the pros from the amateurs. If a tie in a football or a baseball game is like kissing your sister, then a tie in an Iowa caucus would be like kissing Rick Santorum’s sister.

Gail Collins: David, you must be exhausted. Did you wait up all night for the critical deciding votes from a precinct in Clinton County to come in? This is yet another reason to ignore the Iowa caucuses. The entire vote may be smaller than the population of Pomona, Calif. But the population of Clinton County is smaller than my sister’s block in San Diego.

David: I am exhausted. I can’t tell you how many reporters drank me under the table at the Marriott bar. Being part of the media elite stinks. But let’s start with the guy who won it, nominally, Mitt Romney. My own view is that this result weakens him and makes it more likely that he gets the nomination. It makes him more likely because the candidates who might have gone the distance with him are in trouble or cracking up — Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. Read more…

David Brooks: Gail, I’m on vacation this week, and in my absence the entire political world seems to have come to bipartisan agreement: Newt Gingrich would be a terrible president. I believe this. George Will believes this. Michael Savage, the über-populist shock jock, is offering him $1 million to quit the race. Every commentator on the left believes this.

Needless to say, Gingrich is surging in the polls. So my question is, are we the top 1 percent of opinions? Do we in the commentariat possess a disproportionate share of the national pontifications? Does the rest of the country resent this unequal distribution of certitude? Are they rejecting our views on Gingrich because the 99 percent rejects the top 1 percent, or is it just because they really do want honeymoon suites on Mars and they are willing to stop at nothing to get them? Read more…

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, let’s talk about something other than the Republican primaries. Newt Gingrich is just not a holiday subject.

David Brooks: Are you sure? I think Gingrich had a lobbying contract with the Pharisees. They paid him $1.6 million a year for his work as a historian.

Gail: Actually, I wanted to take a holiday political break so I can complain about holiday overkill. I know I’ve brought up this question in the past, but it came rocketing back yesterday morning when I was standing in line at my neighborhood Starbucks, forced to listen to Neil Diamond singing “The Little Drummer Boy.”

“The Little Drummer Boy” is my least favorite Christmas song. There’s something about that pa-rum-pum that curdles my spine. It should never be sung by anyone over the age of 8. Anyway, then I remembered that the day before, I had been in the very same place and I was forced to listen to Dean Martin singing “Winter Wonderland.” This seems wrong, very wrong. Read more…

Gail Collins: David, we almost always talk about politics. Today let’s pick something less contentious. How about religion?

David Brooks: This is great. I just finished Peter Brown’s magnificent biography of Augustine. I’m all ready to talk about the Donatists and Pelagianism. Did you know that even though they lived roughly 1,700 years ago, the Donatists were just like our two parties today. They were more interested in following their accepted doctrine than in looking at reality. Augustine smoked them in debate.

Gail: This is why I like talking to you so much. You’ve been reading profound intellectual explorations of history and I’ve been watching the Thanksgiving Family Forum. I don’t know if you caught it. That was the Mitt-less debate/talkathon in which the six candidates who are competing to be the Right-Wing Romney Alternative sat around a table filled with what appeared to be plastic squash and pumpkins and talked about religion and morality.

David: Republican debates are like e-mail. I fall behind. They stack up in my inbox. I mean to get to them but the longer things go the more new ones stack up. Maybe on Black Friday I’ll watch a bunch while waiting for parking at the mall. I did read about that one though. Read more…

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gene J. Puskar/Associated PressJoe Paterno walked on to the field at Beaver Stadium for warm-ups before an N.C.A.A. college football game against Michigan State.

Gail Collins: David, I can’t get over the horror show at Penn State. I wish I knew more about football so I could make some smart comments about the meaning of Joe Paterno. But all I can think about is: If you’re the coach and you hear that a man is hurting a kid in the shower, this was not the moment to send a report up the chain of command.

David Brooks: Well, this is the one story more revolting than the Herman Cain groping and the Michael Jackson doctor. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this one too. I presume, based on a lifetime of watching Penn State football, that Paterno is basically a decent man. I presume the administrators are in some way decent, because most people are.

But what could have made them so numb and callous? How could they have not been seized by revulsion after hearing the reports of what was happening? How could they have not felt a desire to expunge this from their athletic system?

It’s the failure to follow normal intuitions that is striking. Perhaps they didn’t want to believe this of one of their own. Perhaps they’d been trained to think legally rather than morally and passionately?

Maybe they just feared the taint that would cling to their beloved program if they reported the allegations. Now, as always, things have become much worse. Pain now is better than pain deferred. Read more…

Gail Collins: Absolutely. It’s one of our duties as opinionators to call attention to the fact that too much attention is being paid to something.

It is extremely dangerous to extrapolate from the protests to the wider country.

David Brooks: I mentioned in my last column that Americans are paying less attention to the movement than any other major news story, like the continuing war in Afghanistan. This makes total sense to me. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have cycled through Afghanistan and Iraq, with millions of relatives. There are tens of thousands of people worldwide in the Occupy movements. I’m in Minneapolis and the movement here has about 30 people, as best I can tell. I visited the one in Washington and there were maybe 80 people. So even if you just count the people directly involved, the movement is small.

Sure, they are photogenic, and they do have some grievances, but it is extremely dangerous to extrapolate from the protests to the wider country.

Gail Collins: You know, back in the all-print days we used to do surveys asking readers what their main news interests were, and the readers would always say foreign affairs. Couldn’t get enough of it. When the surveyors actually probed deeper, it turned out that quite a few of the foreign affairs fans had specific knowledge only of the sports section. I’m sort of dubious about people’s theories about what they’re reading. But I did notice that a report on the first day of protests was one of The Times 10 most visited stories over the past month. Also, for the past month “Occupy Wall Street” is the No. 1 search. Read more…

David Brooks: The only survey I’ve seen on who these people are was conducted by New York magazine. Three percent are mainstream liberals of the Barack Obama variety. Twelve percent you might call assertive liberals in the manner of our own Paul Krugman. Roughly 40 percent say they are outside the two parties in the manner of an angrier Ralph Nader, and about 34 percent say there is no moral distinction to be made between Al Qaeda and America. In other words, this is a pretty hard left group.

I actually do think America is morally superior to Al Qaeda. I wouldn’t want to associate with a group in which a third disagree. I’m sort of surprised that so many mainstream liberals are completely unbothered by this. I’m also surprised there aren’t more liberals like Arthur Schlesinger in days of yore, willing to draw lines between liberalism and radicalism, between themselves and Noam Chomsky. Read more…

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Let me start with the smaller tragedy before I get to the larger one. Gov. Chris Christie will not be running for president. To me this means he will never be president. Those who hesitate the first time they have a chance to run, never win later on.

Gail Collins: Unless you happen to be the son of a president, the rule seems to be that you have to run unsuccessfully but manically, and then, after you lose, devote the next several years to wandering around looking eligible. Then and only then are you ripe for picking.

Mel Evans/Associated PressGov. Chris Christie, of New Jersey, announced on Oct. 4, that he will not run for president in 2012.

David Brooks: Well, it’s a shame because I wanted to have the fat debate. Many of our colleagues (not in The Times, but elsewhere) wrote that Christie was too obese to be elected. Personally, I don’t think people should be condemned or judged for things that are largely genetic, but apparently some pundits disagree.

Gail Collins: I always like to tell the story about a very trim and athletic Republican who ran for Senate against Ted Kennedy during one of Kennedy’s fat periods, running ads that showed Kennedy trying to squeeze himself behind a table. That would have been Mitt Romney. The Kennedy people got some workers who had been downsized out of their jobs in one of Romney’s Bain Capital takeovers, and Mitt was destroyed by his own lust for thinness. Read more…